a boy named hussein...,
2006-12-11 19:13:00
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ain't easy bein whitey...,
2006-12-12 13:13:46
the really existing kadima party platform:
I swear to god nobody has ever actually taken the three seconds necessary to actually read the Kadima party platform. Maybe four seconds if you count the google search to dig it up and read real slow. Random commenter over here thinks it was "a platform of giving up 90+% of the WB". A Peace Now activist thinks it was "to manage a unilateral withdrawal of much of the West Bank." Scott Wilson of the Washington Post thinks it was "a promise to evacuate dozens of Jewish settlements in the West Bank".
Somewhere admist those links we helpfully explain that the actual number of settlements Kadima was thinking about moving inside the West Bank was in fact a total of 11. Nobody was going to be withdrawn and no territory was to be given back to the Palestinians. I'm basically quoting Kadima party members there. If you can't believe the party with the platform who can you believe?
Their actions. Everytime I see a statement like those I check the news for what the part of the West Bank the Kadima party has, instead, lately claimed. There's numerous examples, but the coverage seems to have dried up since Israeli Education Minister Yuli Tamir issued instructions to show the Green Line in new textbooks a week or two ago. It's a sensitive time to be reporting about all the activity going on past a line that semi-officially doesn't exist, I suspect.
But I did notice an important report on the subject from Haaretz in late October that I missed. It's at least as important as the CIA intelligence confirming the IAEA's statements that there's no evidence of a super-secret Iranian weapons program.
Here's most of it: "Settlements grow on Arab land, despite promises made to U.S.", 10/24/2006:
A secret, two year investigation by the defense establishment shows that there has been rampant illegal construction in dozens of settlements and in many cases involving privately owned Palestinian properties.
The information in the study was presented to two defense ministers, Amir Peretz and his predecessor Shaul Mofaz, but was not released in public and a number of people participating in the investigations were asked to sign non-disclosure agreements.
In conversations with Haaretz, the sources maintained that the report is not being made public in order to avoid a crisis with the U.S. government.
Brigadier General Baruch Spiegel, assistant to the Defense Minister, retired earlier this month. Spiegel was also in charge of the various issues relating to the territories, which Dov Weisglass, chief of staff in prime minister Ariel Sharon's office, promised Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in writing that Israel would deal with. These commitments included illegal settlement building, improvements in the conditions of Palestinian civilians, and a closer oversight over the conduct of soldiers at IDF roadblocks.
The lack of updated information stemmed from the fact that the defense establishment preferred not to know what was going on, but was also linked to a number of key officials in the Civil Administration actively deleting information from the data base out of ideological allegiance with the settlers.
Spiegel and his team compared the data available from the Civil Administration to that of the Americans, and carried out dozens of overflights of the territories, using private aircraft at great expense, in order to complete the data base.
The findings of the study, security sources say, show an amazing discrepancy between the Civil Administration's data and the reality on the ground. The data in Spiegel's investigation served as the basis for the report on the illegal outposts prepared by attorney Talya Sasson and made public in March 2005.
"Everyone is talking about the 107 outposts," said a source familiar with the data, "but that is small change. The really big picture is the older settlements, the 'legal' ones. The construction there has been ongoing for years, in blatant violation of the law and the regulations of proper governance."
Three years ago, in talks with the Americans, Israel promised that all new construction in the older settlements would take place near existing neighborhoods. The idea was that construction would be limited to meeting the needs of the settlements' natural growth, and bringing to an end the out-of-control expansion over territory.
In practice, the data shows that Israel failed to meet its commitments: many new neighborhoods were systematically built on the edge of areas of the settlement's jurisdiction, which is a much larger territory than the actual planning charts account for.
Meanwhile, construction in the new outposts has intensified. Sources in the Yesha Council say that since the Lebanon War, "Junior officers on the ground are in our favor and in many instances turn a blind eye regarding mobile homes in place."
The Administration seems to be pretty clearly spitting on its own roadmap by conceding even to continued construction on existing settlements.
If you haven't read the actual platform, I linked to it in my first post on the subject last May, as officials were publically approving expansions of existing settlments. By at least last September Olmert was publically putting his name to papers even as further settlements were being started in the middle of Palestinian neighborhoods.
It used to be Fatah and Arafat who were the rejectionists, but that's not stressed so often now that Hamas is there to be scapegoated as mindless dogmatists in the persuit of a foregone loss. Like Iraq's WMDs and Iran's nuclear program this is another bewildering array of fantasy, hardened by over 30 years of dedicated propaganda. Everytime a party to the Arab side of the conflict approaches acceptance it's necessary to first attack them in the hopes that they return to rejectionism, and if that doesn't work then it's necessary to lie about it.
There needs to be at least enough support for inconvenient facts in the electorate to get congress to admit to them, so that we as a nation can grapple with the facts. We're terribly short a few brave members of congress to help the effort. We're coming up short everywhere. The media pretends to know nothing. I don't understand politics or the contingent popularity contests, so I'm no help on these scores. But it's about damned time Americans were informed of Kadima and its Labour ally's really existing platform to seize, apparently, everything they can so long as it doesn't threaten the ultimate goal "to maintain a Jewish majority", including more of the West Bank than it started out with.
There's never been a settlement freeze. We have yet to see a single "territorial concession" by the state of Israel. The supposed failures of "land for peace" are transparent: who expects to get peace by stealing land?
